![](\"https:\/\/media.wired.com\/photos\/5c7046d12ade7f1fa9449cc4\/master\/pass\/McCabe-681974904.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Credit to Author: Garrett M. Graff| Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2019 20:30:37 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n If New Yorker<\/em> writer George Packer hadn\u2019t already taken the title, former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe\u2019s new book might be best titled The Unwinding<\/em><\/a>. McCabe, who became Twitter-famous in Trump\u2019s Washington as a key figure in the presidential \u201cWitch Hunt\u201d of the Russia probe, has written this memoir in part as a spirited defense of the rule of law, and it paints an intimate portrait of roughly 10 months that rocked the FBI and the Justice Department.<\/p>\n The events of The Threat<\/em><\/a> span the summer of 2016 through May 2017, encompassing the bungling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation<\/a>, the election of Donald Trump<\/a>, the bureau\u2019s investigation of Michael Flynn<\/a>, and, finally, the 10 chaotic days that began with the firing of FBI director James Comey<\/a> and ended with the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller<\/a>, the man who had preceded Comey at the bureau.<\/p>\n While most of the headlines about McCabe\u2019s book have dealt with his observations on Trump\u2014including the president's still-stunning \u201cI believe Putin<\/a>\u201d line\u2014those allegations offer little that\u2019s new, painting a familiar picture of a rambling, egotistical id incarnate<\/a> who is unable to even feign interest in intellectual subjects, policy nuances, or, frankly, anything that\u2019s not about Trump.<\/p>\n Instead, McCabe\u2019s greatest contribution in furthering our understanding of the \u201cRussia probe\u201d is in deepening our knowledge of that period of unwinding, tracing the inner workings of the Justice Department and the FBI during both the pre-election controversy over Hillary Clinton\u2019s email investigation and the Comey firing. Rather than ending the then-nascent Russia probe, as Trump evidently wanted<\/a>, those events instead launched Mueller\u2019s heavyweight investigation<\/a>, which may now be in its final hours or days<\/a>.<\/p>\n Over the past two years, Trump and his cable news and talk radio allies have painted the trio of Rod Rosenstein, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe as an inseparable "Deep State" cabal. Yet McCabe\u2019s portrait of the inner workings of the FBI and the Justice Department at the time shows the three men as anything but united. In fact, quite the opposite.<\/p>\n What emerges from McCabe\u2019s enlightening portrait is how isolated each man felt amid some of the worst pressures of their careers.<\/p>\n Much of the middle of McCabe\u2019s book recounts the Clinton email investigation, codenamed MIDYEAR EXAM. (McCabe jokes that given his role at the time as the FBI\u2019s third in command, a position that entailed numerous midyear reviews of the FBI\u2019s 56 field offices, the only more confusing codename \u201cwould have been \u2018Lunch.\u2019\u201d) McCabe clearly wishes he could put the case behind him: \u201cFor the rest of our lifetimes, everyone involved will be asked about Midyear, the zombie apocalypse of counterintelligence cases,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n McCabe makes clear how he felt about the case as it unfolded, saying the Justice Department\u2019s leadership was \u201chalf-in, half-out, and all confused.\u201d He labels the choices made by Comey and the DOJ about handling the matter as \u201cfeckless\u201d and \u201cfatal.\u201d<\/p>\n McCabe\u2019s book wrestles more deeply than Comey\u2019s book did with the conun\u00addrums that faced the FBI.<\/p>\n Amid the pre-election letter \u201creopening\u201d the Clinton email investigation<\/a>, Comey\u2014according to McCabe\u2014was more deeply concerned that prominent Clinton associates had donated money to McCabe\u2019s wife\u2019s state senate race<\/a> than he had initially let on. McCabe, meanwhile, disagreed with Comey\u2019s decision to send Congress a letter announcing that the investigation had been reopened\u2014which didn\u2019t much matter, because Comey cut McCabe out of the decisionmaking around the letter anyway. \u201cI think it was a mistake to send that letter,\u201d McCabe writes. \u201cSometimes the riskier choice is the more responsible one.\u201d<\/p>\n McCabe\u2019s book wrestles more deeply than Comey\u2019s book<\/a> did with the conundrums that faced the FBI amid that investi\u00adgation, and McCabe\u2014unlike Comey\u2014is willing to state outright that the FBI\u2019s attempt to be apolitical actually had the opposite effect. \u201cThe FBI does everything possible not to influence elections,\u201d McCabe writes. \u201cIn 2016, it seems we did.\u201d<\/p>\n As the book unfolds, McCabe moves through the equally confounding Michael Flynn investigation, in the opening days of the Trump White House, and how he remains confused to this day about why the national security advisor lied to interviewing FBI agents. According to McCabe, Flynn even admitted on the phone to him that the FBI surely knew the content of his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.<\/p>\n The Flynn investigation unfolds as the bureau leadership comes to understand that Trump is a different animal from presidents past. As McCabe says, \u201cWe were laboring under the same dank, gray shadow of uncertainty and bleak anxiety that had been creeping over so much of Washington during the few months Donald Trump had been in office.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s subsequent pressuring of Comey to let the Flynn matter drop was a butterfly flapping its wings, setting in motion the events leading to Comey\u2019s firing months later. The period after his departure brings into stark relief the isolation among Comey, McCabe, and Rosenstein. I\u2019ve long argued<\/a> that Rosenstein stands as one of the most intriguing figures of the Russia probe, the man whose entire historical legacy will hinge upon just two decisions\u2014writing the memo used to fire Comey, and then appointing Mueller as special counsel.<\/p>\n They were anything but a warm trio of happy Deep Staters. We\u2019ve known for some time that Comey was wary of Rosenstein; Benjamin Wittes recounted nearly two years ago that Comey had privately expressed reservations about the then-nominee to be deputy attorney general. As Wittes recalled<\/a>, \u201cThat said, [Comey\u2019s] reservations were palpable. \u2018Rod is a survivor,\u2019 he said. And you don\u2019t get to survive that long across administrations without making compromises. \u2018So I have concerns.\u2019\u201d (A similar recounting of the conversation was also published<\/a> in The New York Times<\/em>.)<\/p>\n And in McCabe\u2019s telling, the sheer isolation of Rosenstein\u2014now distrusted by the bureau and yet simultaneously unembraced by his boss, attorney general Jeff Sessions\u2014stands clear. At one point, McCabe recounts Rosenstein, leaning back in his chair, emotion in his voice, obviously upset, saying, \u201cThere\u2019s no one that I can talk to about this. There\u2019s no one here that I can trust.\u201d As those chaotic post-firing days unfolded, Rosenstein\u2014back on his heels\u2014tried to get McCabe to contact Comey on his behalf to ask about appointing a special counsel. The deputy attorney general even called McCabe on a Sunday afternoon and used coded language to ask: Had McCabe talked to Comey? \u201cIt appeared to me that he was at the end of his rope,\u201d McCabe says.<\/p>\n The tension of adjusting to Trump plays out throughout McCabe\u2019s own interactions with the president\u2014as the nonpartisan career government employee struggles to understand how to converse with the president of the United States.<\/p>\n The FBI\u2019s deputy directors rarely write memoirs; the career special agents who rise to that post tend to prefer their anonymity.<\/p>\n \u201cThe automatic response I felt from the deepest part of myself was to be respectful and responsive,\u201d McCabe says at one point. And yet each conversation with the president seemed to be a fantasy. \u201cAt what point is it appropriate to say to the president, Your perception is disconnected from reality,\u201d McCabe writes. He further says that many of his own interactions with the president reminded him of his days working Russian organized crime\u2014McCabe says he felt on more than one occasion that he was being offered the president\u2019s \u201cprotection\u201d in exchange for his own fealty. McCabe notes at one point, as his head reels again from another mind-bending and precedent-bending conversation, \u201cI am starting to wish that there were more synonyms for shock.\u201d<\/p>\n McCabe\u2019s conclusions are cutting and direct. \u201cThe work of the FBI is being undermined by the current president,\u201d he says at the beginning of the book, and in the final pages, he concludes, \u201cI don\u2019t want to get down in the mud with the president \u2026. But I will say this. Donald Trump would not know the men and women of the FBI if he ran over them with the presidential limo, and he has shown the citizens of this country that he does not know what democracy means.\u201d<\/p>\n The FBI\u2019s deputy directors rarely write memoirs; the career special agents who rise to that post tend to prefer their anonymity. McCabe, notably, is the first to author a commercial book since Mark Felt, the FBI deputy who served as Watergate\u2019s \u201cDeep Throat.\u201d But leaving aside the controversies and oddities of the final two years of his two-decade-long career with the FBI, McCabe\u2019s memoir would actually stand as one of the better recent contributions to the sagging bookshelf filled with hard-boiled \u201cG-man memoirs,\u201d as he walks readers through his early years working Russian organized crime, terrorism cases post-9\/11, and the Boston Marathon bombing case.<\/p>\n He goes deep into FBI procedures, helpfully explaining how and why the FBI opens and conducts its investigations, how preliminary inquiries grow into \u201cfull field investigations,\u201d and how hunches evolve into suspicions and then into evidence. He even explains how FBI agents unbuckle their seat belts differently than civilians (no, really\u2014check page 32).<\/p>\n McCabe also adds interesting color to our understanding of the cipher behind the Russia probe, the silent, stone-faced special counsel Robert Mueller, who McCabe worked under for 13 years while Mueller served as FBI director. I, for one, learned that Mueller \u201cdetested diagonal lines,\u201d and McCabe\u2019s book offers a master class in decoding Mueller\u2019s body language, and on how to answer Mueller\u2019s probing cross-examination-style questions. \u201cAlways the questions, welling up from his prosecutorial soul,\u201d McCabe explains.<\/p>\n At one point, McCabe seems to wish that he could rewind the last three years and return to the ethos cultivated by the special counsel back when he was director. As McCabe says, \u201cLet\u2019s be the normal Bob Mueller, say-nothing FBI of old.\u201d<\/p>\n For the sake of American democracy, we should all hope that someday\u2014soon\u2014the FBI can get back to that place. The faster we\u2019re all able to lose interest in the no-longer-juicy, world-altering machinations of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the White House, the better off we\u2019ll all be.<\/p>\n Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg<\/a>) is a contributing editor for WIRED and the co-author of Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat<\/a><\/em>. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com<\/em><\/p>\n When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more<\/a> about how this works.<\/em><\/p>\n